


The Cost of Protection

by Brownies96



Series: Good Omens Missing Chapters [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Crowley has a moment of lucidity, M/M, Multi, Other, Travelling all over Earth, historically "accurate", so much pining, they are clueless throughout history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 17:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21103262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brownies96/pseuds/Brownies96
Summary: After speaking in Wessex, Crowley and Aziraphale dance around each other and also this whole idea of an "Arrangement". After all, it's a terrible idea, isn't it?





	1. Snakes on a Rock

**Author's Note:**

> This all takes place after the canon 537AD interaction in Wessex. This story will be rather short because Aziraphale is avoiding Crowley, well, sort of. He’s doing his best.

602 AD Sicily

Aziraphale was most definitely not supposed to be here. There was that war happening in the Byzantine Empire, or the whole baptism business happening in Wales. But one of the most fascinating things about earth was change. Not just in the sense of a change of scenery, but also because you could leave a place, come back to it, say, 200 years later, and it would be completely different. Sure, the bones of the land were still there, but it was so in the nature of humanity to change things, to try and improve them, that no place remained unchanged.

Angels (and demons for that matter) were not built to change. They did not have childhoods, or adolescences, they were created fully formed. This meant that, in a lot of ways, they were creatures ill-suited to Earth where each generation sought to improve upon the last, especially when they managed to succeed. By the time most angels and demons had gotten used to ideas like ‘the wheel’ and ‘boats’, humanity had already moved on to bigger and better things. With two notable exceptions: the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley.

But even they were not immune to feeling a tad overwhelmed by the mercurial nature of humanity from time to time. And so Aziraphale had sought out something to remind him of what had come before. Sicily hadn’t fared much better than the mainland of Italy since the fall of Rome, but outside of Syracuse and the larger cities, the townships were mostly peaceful people just trying to get by. True, it was a little quiet, but that was just what Aziraphale needed.

He had, perhaps, heard rumours that something was plaguing this village in particular. Yes there was the pox, there was always the pox when you didn’t have the sense not to cough and spit openly and had no knowledge on how to properly wash things. No this was something else, people being plagued by bad luck. He’d done his best to convince Gabriel that it was demonic activity that warranted a closer look. Gabriel seemed to have bought it, or at the very least, he couldn’t be bothered refuting Aziraphale.

The village was south, slightly, down to coast from Syracuse. It happened to have beautiful beaches and an array of plant life that included the ever-delicious Sicilian olive. Aziraphale was just settling down at the only inn for miles when he heard a scream.

Screams, in Aziraphale’s opinion, were completely unnecessary in such a peaceful place. A hearty shout would have the same effect and be a lot less unpleasant. But he supposed humans couldn’t help their instincts. He followed his landlady down outside to see a man who had managed to fall over seemingly nothing while carrying a wagon full of amphorae filled with olive oil. The man swore loudly and began to complain at the landlady as she helped him up. It took Aziraphale a minute to understand what he was saying as the Sicilian dialect was so different to the Latin he was used to.

“ . . . first that bloody snake and now this! How the hell am I supposed to feed my family with nothing to sell?”

Oh no. No. No. No. This was supposed to be something of a holiday. He was supposed to cure a few cases of the pox and tell Gabriel that if the bad luck had been demonic in origin, then the demon had fled. After all, most demons were rather afraid of him after Milan[*](https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/50213891#work_endnotes). He reached out to the man and, sure enough, he could smell smoke.

He and Crowley so seldom managed to part on good terms. Really, they should never have parted on good terms, or even spoken on good terms at all. But for them, it was really more like having some kind of understanding of what the other did. After all, they were the only two beings that had been on Earth for as long as they had. If they parted because one of them actually had work to be doing and not because they hand managed to start fighting, that was ‘good terms’ as far as Aziraphale was concerned.

But how could Crowley have said such a thing last time? He knew it was in Crowley’s nature to question things, after all, that was how he had ended up a demon in the first place, but to question the very mechanics of their universes. It was too much. Aziraphale had steered clear of ‘the Black Knight’ since then, and once King Arthur had passed on, he’d stayed clear of Wessex altogether, leaving as soon as the funeral had ended.

“Excuse me, but where was this snake?” Aziraphale asked the man. The man gestured to the greenery behind him and showed Aziraphale his leg.

“Bloody bastard bit me!” He said.

There was no venom in the bite, it was very clearly a warning tag, but Aziraphale didn’t think it wise to tell the man this, so instead he headed off in the direction he had been directed to, reaching out his senses in search of Crowley’s scent.

He came to a small clearing with a large rock in the centre. Or at least, he assumed there was a large rock in the centre, as it was currently being covered by an enormous black snake.

“Bugger off.” Said a disembodied voice.

“I know it’s you. Crowley,” Aziraphale said, pacing around the rock until he found the serpent’s head.

“So? M’trying to sleep here,” Crowley opened his golden eyes, but did not move.

“You’ve been giving people bad luck,” Aziraphale’s tone was an odd combination of resentful and reproachful.

“Serves them right for poking a bloody snake, doesn’t it?” Crowley said, moving his head back slightly so his neck bent in an ‘s’ shape.

Aziraphale paused. Part of him berated himself, he should have known Crowley was only acting in self-defence. The other part of him told that part to shut up, this was a demon he was dealing with, not a friend no matter how many meals they’d shared. Still, surely there had to be a way to settle this. Aziraphale wanted to stay here, and of Crowley was going to be asleep there was no reason why he couldn’t enjoy his stay here as well.

“Couldn’t you just, scare them away or something? Please.”

Crowley’s expression was unreadable, and not just because he was a snake and snakes are rather limited in their ability to express themselves with facial features. “Fine.”

There was another pause. Aziraphale was just about to try and excuse himself when a question occurred to him.

“Why are you sleeping, anyway? It’s not as if we need to.”

“Feel’s good,” Crowley did the snake-equivalent of shrugging, “Why do you eat?”

“A fair point,” Aziraphale conceded.

Crowley yawned dramatically, “Go have a look at that tree,” he said, gesturing with his tail.

“Why?” Aziraphale was on his guard now. He remembered what happened last time Crowley had suggested someone do that. It had not ended well for her.

Crowley rolled his eyes, “It’s an olive tree.” He tucked his head back down onto himself.

“Oh. I see,” Aziraphale said sheepishly.

Crowley pointedly shut his eyes, leaving Aziraphale to wonder over to the tree and pick olives to his heart’s content.

The rest of Aziraphale’s break in Sicily went rather well, he miraculously cured a few people of the pox and once people realised he could be brought with good food, people were finding good luck where the bad luck used to be. He had certainly thwarted evil plans, or at least that was what he told Gabriel. But none of his reports mentioned the serpent on the rock, sleeping for days on end.


	2. Aziraphale does not care about Crowley’s new shades, just ask him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have very strong headcanons for Crowley and Aziraphale when it comes to their relationship with gender (and I swear it’s not just me projecting on Crowley). I HC Aziraphale as being agender because he just doesn’t feel any connection to it and I HC Crowley as Polygender and genderfluid, he hoards genders like a dragon, they’re his now. All of them. (OK maybe it is me projecting on Crowley). I’d also like to point out that pronouns in Nordic languages are very loose and seldom gendered. That’s great but I’ve just made it he/him here because that’s what Crowley uses the most in the show.

975AD Niðarós, Norway

It was definitely Crowley over there, leaning against the vendor’s table, few others would wear a hangerock over a tunic and trousers, and fewer still covered their eyes. The vendor seemed to be making a joke, based on the way Crowley threw their head back and laughed. Aziraphale was too far away to hear.

The markets had been busy of late, Aziraphale suspected it had something to do with the new church that was being built on the land. It was the first Christian church on the land, or it would be anyway, once it was done.

“I’m telling you Ingrid, just rotate the mould and bam! It’s a cross instead of Mjolnir. Just sell it as both,” Crowley was saying.

“I’m onto you, _mesterslange_,” said Ingrid fondly, “I know a trick when I see one. But it would be a shame to have to get rid of all these moulds, and a lot of work to make new ones.”

Crowley just grinned at her, looking rather smug.

“Kjeltring!” she said, laughing again, “fine, you win!”

Ah, so he was a he at the moment. Aziraphale had always had a level of admiration for Crowley’s capacity for gender and its many forms and variations. Not that he was running off to admire a demon or anything of the sort. It was just that Aziraphale really only stuck to ‘male’ pronouns and clothing because it was generally easier. In most of the societies he’d lived in, it had simply been a lot easier to be seen as a ‘man’. But he had no real attachment to it. The temple of Vesta had certainly been enlightening, it was the first time he’d ever tried to present as a ‘woman’ and it seemed to have gone fine. He would have appreciated the opportunity to discuss these things with Crowley, but he wasn’t supposed to talk to him at all, wanting to talk to him was out of the question. And after Wessex . . . It seemed like a particularly bad idea.

Heedless of his own advice, Aziraphale walked closer.

“Those things, on your face,” Ingrid began to say and Aziraphale’s blood went cold. If she took them off him, in front of everyone, it would be very bad news for both of them. But surely, Crowley could manage his own? Right? Still, it never hurt to be sure.

“My eyes,” Crowley said, his tone still calm and confident, “they’re sensitive to light.”

“I’m not a doctor, I don’t care about your eyes,” she said, “I’ve never seen anything like these before. And why are the glass portions so small? They wouldn’t shield you from much light.”

“They’re called lenses,” Crowley said.

“Pah!” Ingrid spat, “They’re ridiculous, that’s what they are. Do you have a spare pair?”

Aziraphale watched Crowley reach into the leather pouch on his belt and pull out the glasses. Ingrid took them and began to examine them.

“Come back here tomorrow,” she said, tersely, clearly more interested in the glasses than more conversation.

“OK,” Crowley said, stretching the word out and leaving the vendor. And heading straight for Aziraphale. Oh Heaven! He couldn’t run. Or hide.

“Suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re here,” Crowley said. It was too late.

“Nor I you,” Aziraphale said, trying to maintain some modicum of calm. He then remembered what Crowley had been saying to the vendor before the tangent about his glasses had begun. “You’re really going to have her going around selling . . .” he took a deep breath, “pagan iconography and pretending that it’s the cross?”

“Why not, they look about the same?” Crowley said carelessly.

“It’s lying.” Aziraphale pursed his lips.

“I’m a demon, that’s in the job desscription,” Crowley retorted.

Aziraphale was ready to argue this. He wanted to. But there was no response to that. And every second longer he spent around Crowley was time he could start thinking about Wessex and that was a terrible idea. Crowley shouldn’t even have dared imply that Heaven didn’t care what he did as long as everything got done. He didn’t know how Hell did things but surely his bosses, the Good bosses, were in the right? Even if it did sometimes feel like Crowley’s words had had a grain of truth to them.

“Then, I bid you good day,” Aziraphale said, with all the fussiness he could summon, and he walked back over to what would soon be a church.

He did keep an eye out for Crowley though. He was back at Ingrid’s shop just about every day, laughing and talking. And if he looked closely. Which, of course, he didn’t. He could see that Crowley wore new glasses, larger and made with carefully wrought silver. But, of course, he didn’t see them, and therefore could not have commented on their appearance even if he had an opinion because he didn’t. Not at all.


	3. The First Crusade

1099 Outside Jerusalem

“He kidnapped you from your village and makes you wash his dirty bloody socks. What reason could you possibly have to not want to poison him?” Crowley was done with subtlety. Subtlety had flown out the window four years ago when some idiot had decided that She wanted the Europeans to go and invade the Middle East. Normally, Crowley would have been thrilled with an excuse to escape the cold and damp, but this was ridiculous.

The woman he was tempting, a crone who had been taken from her village by a crusader in need of a slave to do all the things he couldn’t be bothered to do; cook, laundry, etc., peered at him. These crones were easy pickings for temptations, since none of them really wanted to be there in the first place. And he had been asked to disrupt these ‘Crusades’ as much as he could, just in case She really had ordered them. These didn’t really feel like Her style, but it wasn’t like any of Hell had actually been in contact with Her since time had begun, so maybe She’d changed her business model?

The Crone, whose name was Alyss, eyed Crowley with some suspicion. She couldn’t talk well due to pretty extreme gum disease that she’d developed so long ago she could no longer remember life without it. Not being able to talk without pain had led to her being seen as rather stupid and harmless. This could not have been further from the truth. She was sharp, and this was what had made Crowley approach her. She had a mind that reminded him of Ingrid, to some extent. He still wore the glasses she had made him. Both Alyss and Ingrid had been deeply ambitious. The main thing preventing Alyss from taking the branch of oleander Crowley was holding out to her wasn’t a moral compass, it was her wondering what she would do next.

Alyss appreciated the strange man who hid his eyes. He did not demand that she speak, and he seemed to understand what she wanted without her having to spend hours gesturing. She took her time to think about her options. If her crusader somehow managed to survive, he’d just drag her back to England, that wasn’t agreeable at all. If she killed him, she’d be stuck outside Jerusalem. Also not a particularly agreeable situation. But she had been foraging and surviving in the Holy Land for quite some time now, and it would be even easier if she wasn’t trying to feed two.

She held her hand out to the man. He shook his head and pulled a glove from his pocket that she could have sworn wasn’t there earlier. He handed her the glove and she pulled it on. It fit her rather well, that was certainly unusual, his long spindly fingers would never have fit in it. He only handed her the branch once it was on, she got the message: Don’t touch it.

As soon as Crowley was out of her sight, he changed to his snake form. It was a lot easier to cause trouble if people didn’t get used to seeing him, kept them on their toes. Also, if Hastur or anyone else showed up, all he had to do was slither into a group of nearby humans to cause some good old-fashioned chaos. This was completely foreign territory for the crusaders, after all, who knew what kinds of deadly snakes could live here.

He flicked his tongue out and expanded his senses (fun fact: snakes smell with their tongues). There had been no Heavenly presence so far. Which was fine, of course, great even, it meant every single person on this Crusade was condemning themselves to Hell for presuming to speak for Her (unless they saw the error of their ways and begged for forgiveness, which they seldom did). But this close to Jerusalem he wasn’t sure he would sense the presence of Heaven, it was like everything was coated with a layer of sugar, all he could feel was Jesus’ affection for the place in which he had spent much of his life. It had been a very long time since Crowley had thought about Jesus. He wondered what he would have thought about all this. He probably would have tried to talk the crusaders down and then offered them all a bath and some food. Crowley smirked fondly at the thought.

He felt a drop of something cold hit the top of his head and he looked up in alarm, but the sky was a blue as ever, almost painfully so in the July heat. No, this thing that had hit him was a drip of frozen fruit juice. Who could eat while they plan an invasion? He wondered. Ah. That question answered itself. He phased back to his human form.

“Watch where you’re dripping, Aziraphale,” he said, wiping the juice form his back with a miracle.

“Goodness!” Aziraphale jumped. Clearly, he too was unable to sense much.

“Not quite,” Crowley said dryly.

“Right, erm,” Aziraphale paused. His eyes refused to meet Crowley’s and he seemed to be shuffling his weight between his feet, “Oh look, the person I have to give a visitation to just fell asleep. I suppose I have to go now. Lovely chat.” He quickly made his way over to the only person asleep in the middle of the day, he looked like some sort of hermit.

“Right.” Crowley was certain that Aziraphale was trying to avoid him. Well, good luck with that, Crowley thought, we both work on Earth. In fact, Crowley found himself tumbling headfirst into the beginnings of an idea. Aziraphale couldn’t avoid him forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters inspired by Horrible Histories skits? It’s more likely that you might think.


	4. The Worst Crusade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Children’s Crusade was every bit as bad as I am making it sound so TW for kidnapping kids and selling them into slavery. Please put your health and wellbeing first.

1212 Tunisia

For the first time, the two actively sought each other out. There are very few events in history so terrible to behold as this was. This was not a natural disaster beyond intervention from Heaven of Hell. This was what would come to be known as the Children’s Crusade.

Crowley watched the boats pull into the Port of Tunisia with great unease. He could feel the evil in the air, the smell was everywhere in Hell, and when so much of it showed up on Earth it was never a good sign. He watched as boat after boat of children made their way down to the markets. The tang of broken promises not far behind them.

They’d been promised a Children’s Crusade, kindly merchants would offer them passage to the Holy Land. What they got was being sold into slavery. If being sick was something demons did, Crowley would have been.

He felt a rush of fresh baked good and another scent he didn’t quite have the words for yet, Aziraphale appeared beside him.

“You can’t-“

“My lot aren’t about to let me stop them,” Crowley said bitterly, not wanting to think about what Hastur would do if he somehow stopped something this terrible. “Yours?” He asked with hope he knew was foolish and unfounded.

“Afraid not,” Aziraphale said softly. They stood in silence for a few minutes.

“Did they just do a peace treaty? No more Crusades and whatnot?” Crowley asked, wincing as he heard a child begin to cry.

“Well, yes, but this children seemed to think they could do it all peacefully,” Aziraphale said, looking over the horizon.

“Yikes.”

“Indeed. And now, this . . .” Aziraphale looked like he might cry. Crowley fought the urge to touch him by grabbing fists full of the fabric of his surcoat.

“Yeah.” Crowley had to do something. He wanted to break the entirety if Tunisia apart with is bare hands. But that was a tall order even for Satan himself. He’d have to settle for ruining as much as he possibly could, starting with the source of all these bullshit crusades.

He’d followed all of them. Each and every stupid crusade. Part of him hoping to see Aziraphale there, part of him enjoying the awards he received for the violence done in Her name. By the end of the Third Crusade he had known Aziraphale wasn’t going to be there. Nothing could have been further from Her Grace.

There was so much Crowley wanted to say, he wanted to scream and rail at Aziraphale for staying on the side of a God that let this happen to her people. He wanted to scream at Her, ask Her if she was done yet, if humanity had finally suffered enough. But he swallowed it all, and offered Aziraphale only this.

“Stay away from the Vatican for a while,” he said. Hopefully Aziraphale was still determined to avoid him. Hopefully he wouldn’t intervene. He’d probably be commended for months for what he was about to do to the so-called Pope Innocent III.


	5. The Cost of Compassion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am about to talk a lot of shit about the Pope and the Vatican. Roman Catholics be warned. Also both Crowley and Margaret of England are Very Depressed in this chapter. Also a minor character dies (its historically accurate).

1274 Kinclaven Castle, Scotland

Crowley had to concede that deciding to attack the pope was not a smart move. Hell loved the pope and the entire Papal office, after all, they’d found a way to take a message about all of humanity being created equal, and then proceed to build a hierarchy around it. That was some truly evil ingenuity. Thus far there had not been a single Pope to end up in Heaven. Not a single one.

He didn’t think what he’d done was that bad, he’d really just ruined his ability to get on with the Eastern Orthodox church and when that had gotten boring, he’d decided to give the nasty STD he was succumbing to a bit of a boost. But Crowley’s bosses had decided it was enough to warrant real punishment.

That was how Crowley had ended up as a maid in a freezing cold castle in Scotland. She was supposed to be tempting Margaret of England to Hell, but with nothing to work with and a sour mood, it wasn’t really happening.

“D’you ever miss England, M’lady?” she’d ask as Margaret decided to take one of her strolls about the grounds on a particularly bitter night.

“All the time,” Margaret would reply, “the weather was far more agreeable.”

“And you weren’t being bartered around from castle to castle based on what your brother or husband want?” Crowley would say, knowing that on these walks, the Queen of Scots didn’t mind a dash of informality.

“No, that was just as bad there.” Margaret would laugh, a weak sound, like a chime behind a stone wall. She had essentially given up. Years of being a literal prisoner held hostage surrounded by years of being the metaphorical prisoner of the men in her life had ground her resolve to dust. He was resigned to her fate as a baby-factory until she finally died and passed on to anywhere. Hell, Crowley privately thought, was better than this.

The walks on the grounds down by the river were Queen Margaret’s only time when she was able to choose her company. On the July evening in question, Crowley wished she’d chosen her company better, a manservant, she hadn’t bothered to learn his name, was following along beside her, bringing news of England and her brother, the newly coronated king.

“And of course his highness had a great many ideas about what best to do about the border issues . . .”

Margaret didn’t have the strength to sigh, but Crowley did. This was something she could never avoid as servant to the English Queen of Scotland. All anyone wanted to talk about were the land disputes across the border. Behind Ingrid’s glasses, she shared a glance with Margaret.

By all accounts Margaret had been rather wild as a child. Crowley wondered what that must have been like, she never spoke even a word out of turn anymore. Crowley sent just a small trickle of energy to her, she wanted something, anything, to break this monotony, and she suspected Margaret felt the same way.

For the first time in decades, Margaret grinned. She looked over at the manservant and spoke slyly, “I don’t know why you’re so worried about the borders there,” she said, with a smirk that was Crowley approved. The manservant just looked at her, stunned.

“You should be a great deal more worried about the borders here!” She said, pushing him into the river. Hah! Crowley thought, now this was more like it.

The manservant stood and looked down at his muddy clothes. The expression on his face was likely to be the only funny thing Margaret saw for years, so she committed every detail of it to memory.

In all of human history, people have debated whether or not it is the acts of significant individuals or the movement of the masses that create history. The answer is neither. The biggest contributor to human history is random shit: Things that just sort of happened they were neither good nor evil, they just sort of happened. For example, earlier that day a person with no relation to the castle had tossed a few buckets of dirt into the river as she’d attempted to clean her house. The contents of those buckets happened to settle where they formed two sandbars (or dirt-bars in this case), with a small gap in the middle. Anyone who knows anything about water can tell you that this is one way sudden strong undercurrents can be formed. Unfortunately, when this unnamed manservant took a step in the river to regain his footing, he stepped into that undercurrent and was quickly carried away. The weight of his clothes did not help either, but you will not find anyone ready to blame his tailor, so there is no point blaming the woman cleaning her house, so there is no point in blaming Margaret.

Of course Margaret didn’t see it that way. She immediately called for a priest to hear her confession, but of course, the priest at the castle didn’t feel equipped to deal with a confession of such magnitude, so in an unusual show of honesty and knowing one’s limits, he sent out for another priest.

The new confessor was the kindest man Margaret had ever met, though she did not see his face. Through the grille in the confessional booth he eased her conscience, not by telling her to do x number of Hail Marys, but by listening to her fears and assuaging them. He could not heal away her guilt, but he could listen to her and be a voice of kind reason when her terror tried to obscure it. The confession lasted three days. Margaret was not cured of her guilt or the sadness she had had before, but she was able to shoulder the burden slightly better.

Confession was not an option for Crowley. She didn’t even think about it except to have a hysterical laugh at the idea of her trying to enter the church and Hastur’s face if he ever heard she had. She had spent the three days in the gardens, around a large oak tree that had all the stability she didn’t. On the day Margaret finally left the church, Crowley couldn’t find it in her to follow. She had seen and even caused so much death and destruction, and it felt like nothing. She hadn’t felt the rejection of God more keenly in millennia.

She was about to head down to the kitchens in search of copious quantities of alcohol when she heard his voice.

“I know you’re here, Crowley.”

“Down here,” she said, wondering if her voice would be enough to guide Aziraphale down to her nook in the tree’s buttressed roots where she was sprawled.

“I thought I might find you here,” he said, sliding down the tree trunk beside her. He was ill suited to priest’s robes, but at least the white matched what he always wore. “I always seem to find you in gardens.”

Crowley gave a non-committal hum. She couldn’t understand why Aziraphale was here. He’d been avoiding her for centuries and his sudden appearance had thrown her more that she’d ever admit.

“I understand you were there,” Aziraphale said and his time was so gentle. Crowley wanted to throw him across the castle, but that would require energy she just didn’t have.

“Of course I was bloody there,” she said, she didn’t even yell. “Been here for ages.

“And you are alright?” Aziraphale asked, peering at her, but not in the way she wanted to be peered at, like he was concerned for her.

“’sno different to any of the other times,” she said. And it was true, what had her so out of sorts (she would never use the word upset) was the reminder of how bullshit everything was.

“There are far too many other times,” Aziraphale agreed, looking away from her.

“Yeah,” she agreed, “I know I’m supposed to enjoy it, but it just feels like nothing.”

“Nothing?” Aziraphale asked. She just shrugged.

“I still feel bad about it. I try not to think about Sodom and Gomorrah, or the Ark, or even Milan.” Aziraphale said, so quietly it could have been a whisper.

“It was demons in Milan, though,” Crowley pointed out, the irony not lost to her, “and they only got discorporated.”

“It could easily not have been just demons, Holy Lightning is very difficult to control, and I don’t exactly practice its use regularly,” Aziraphale said, louder this time now that he had moved back to objective facts and away from his own fears.

Crowley just stared at him. God’s last order before the Fall had been for Her angels to love all of humanity and Her creations. Lucifer started the war then, by asking why he should love humans if he was so much better than them and then it had all gone downhill from there. Aziraphale was the only angel Crowley had ever known to obey God’s last direct order.

_Pragma_ Diogenes’ voice whispered in her head. _Shut up_, she thought back.

Crowley looked away from Aziraphale to distract herself. The stars were out. Thousands of twinkling lights winking against an obsidian sky. They looked so different form far away.

“See that one?” She said, pointing to a constellation, “I think the humans call it Pegasus.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale said.

“I made that one,” she said, knowing her voice was filled with pride and self-pity, “I made so many stars.” She should stop talking. She should really stop talking, but she couldn’t. No one had spoken to her, the real her, for decades. “I wonder if they’ll be the last thing I ever make.” She said, so quietly no human would have heard it over the wind. But Aziraphale was no human.

Aziraphale looked at her again, she could feel his gaze. “Didn’t you invent the lute?” He said, very kindly offering her a change of subject.

“Not really,” she protested lazily, “I was in Arabia and made a few upgrades to a lyre, the humans did most of the work.”

“They also named your stars,” Aziraphale said, in the same near-inaudible tone Crowley had spoken in moments ago.

Crowley wanted to know why Aziraphale was there. Why was he comforting a demon? Why had he stretched his wing to shelter them both on the wall of Eden? Why did he care at all? But she couldn’t say any of that. He’d run away, just like Wessex, and she wasn’t sure she could give him up. She’d already had to lose God; she wasn’t sure her battered heart could survive losing Aziraphale too.

“They do that, don’t they?” Crowley said, thinking fondly of her favourite humans. “Humans don’t really need us at all most of the time.”

Aziraphale made a face, it was one Crowley had seen a lot, it was the ‘you have a point but if I agree I’ll be going against the doctrine of Heaven’ face.

“They don’t really need us for anything,” she continued, “Nothing I do really matters, it’s just so Hastur can cross it off his to-do list. It’s nowhere near as important as they keep telling themselves it is. Especially if your lot are doing the exact same thing to you. Acting like the Great Ineffable Plan is some universe-wide grocery list of us cancelling each other out.”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said in his warning tone. But Crowley was just getting started. She was sick of this, sick of all of it. There was no point pretending she had a role in some great plan, the greatest plan she was involved in was probably just Hastur planning how to get her out of his hair.

In her dark pit of introspection, she found her own forbidden fruit, something so self-destructive that even moments ago she would never have done it. She wasn’t drunk or high or intoxicated on anything other than her own sadness. She felt like she had nothing to lose, even if she did, so she asked.

“Why comfort a demon anyway?”

Aziraphale froze, his shoulders tensed for just a moment. He stood up and she regretted her words immediately, but it was too late, she’d fucked this up too.

“Because someone should.” Aziraphale said before he left, disappearing into the darkness around him like a star snuffed out.

Crowley knew she had to go too. She would play off the manservant’s death as some kind of demonic intervention on the whole ‘Thou shalt not kill’ thing. And she’d get the Heaven out of Scotland, maybe try to bargain her way into something warmer. Maybe, if she ran from her problems fast enough, they wouldn’t be able to catch up and the sinking void in her mind would disappear.

**Author's Note:**

> * for what happened in Milan see, ‘When in Rome’


End file.
